selfishness (1/2)

- blood (part one) -Kim Minjung yelped and dropped the kitchen knife that bounced off the floor and almost hit Chanyeol's leg. "Ah, damn it!" She held her finger to stop the blood from dripping on the spring onions she just cut.

"I really practised this," she mumbled. "I swear, my cooking has improved a lot lately but I'm still so clumsy." She looked around for a paper towel when she noticed that Chanyeol was just staring at her hand. It was bleeding quite a lot but it was still just a cut on her finger. He though looked at it in utter horror, as if he was expecting a slimy alien to crawl out of her skin.

She was about to make fun of him when her brother entered the kitchen.

"Is anything wrong?" he asked when Minjung and Chanyeol were just kind of staring at each other. When he noticed that Minjung was bleeding, he instantly got her a towel and pulled her out of the kitchen without any further questions.

It was odd. Sure, the emergency kit was in the bathroom, so it was most efficient to get her there right away. But this was Minseok who usually made a fuss when she got hurt.

It was as if she had a deadly virus and as if his priority wasn't to help her but to get her away. Away from the idiot in the kitchen. Before he even checked how deep the cut was, he placed her on the edge of the bath tub and told her to wait for a bit.

It didn't feel right when the one who got all the nice treatment was the one who wasn't hurt. "She's all right," she heard. "It's nothing deep. There won't even be a scar."

It was laughable. He wouldn't even have noticed if her complete finger was cut off.

He was apologetic, so she didn't want to complain when he properly inspected the wound  and put a bandage on it.

"He can't see blood," Minseok explained quietly as he was squatting down in front of her.

And she didn't dare to ask and she knew that there probably was a very good reason but part of her was just mad. She liked Chanyeol a lot but it never occured to her before that there even was the slightest chance of him being more important to her brother than she was. And it was selfish and she knew it was but the feeling just wouldn't go away.

- blood (part two) -Do Kyungsoo liked to think that it was all the bad influence of Jongin's friend's surveillance project the previous year. It was as if he found himself hooked to a soap opera. He knew it was no good and he wouldn't have told anyone about it but he still kind of followed it.

He still sometimes watched the street leading to Kim Minseok's house and got almost excited when he actually saw him or Park Chanyeol. He wondered what they were going to do based on what things they carried and the way they acted. He wasn't a creep, so it was usually just a moment before he went back to minding his own business but it still became part of his life in a way.

When Minjung also joined them more and more often, it was as if the show finally got a new regular side character. It also had the side effect of Kyungsoo becoming something like a guest star. Minjung was more likely to wave him hello and start a conversation than Minseok after all. One time she even invited him for dinner, saying that she was going to cook and he wondered whether she just thought it was too awkward to be alone with her brother and Park Chanyeol.It was probably because he got so used to following them as a viewer that he didn't just disregard the boy in the bus that one evening.

The boy sat a view seats in front of him and hunched down, his face in the shadow of his hat, but Kyungsoo could still tell that he looked pretty bad. It looked as if someone had punched him in the face and there was still crusted blood under his nose.

Kyungsoo knew not to mess with suspicious people like that but the boy looked somewhat familiar and he couldn't really place him.

It was when they got off at the same stop and walked the same road for a bit, when he suddenly had this awkward feeling that this could have something to do with Minseok. When Kyungsoo turned left to get to his house and when the boy kept walking straight into the direction of Minseok's house, he wondered whether it could be that other boy who used to visit Minseok all the time, way before the whole Park Chanyeol mystery started. He barely had the door open when the boy already came back and returned into the direction of the bus stop.

And Kyungsoo wondered if this maybe meant the big conflict created to increase the viewer rate.

- the tool  -Kang Hanna looked at her own reflection in the mirror of the school restroom and sighed. She wondered if she looked so much like a fool or whether that stupid Park Chanyeol had somehow marked her as an easy victim. Maybe guys could smell it like dogs. Maybe they saw her and thought of her as no more than a paper napkin that could be thrown away after using it once.Just when she finally thought that the rumours around her were quieting down, this guy from her parallel class asked her out. Of course she was wary at first but he seemed nice and decent, so she agreed. But she probably just couldn't tell apart genuine niceness from the fake kind. Chanyeol, too, had been nice after all.

It went well for about a week and they went to that dreaded shabby karaoke place. She was choosing her next song when the guy suddenly attacked her. It was her luck that she was holding the mic because she managed to knock him out with it and run away.

She should have told someone right away. She should have gone to the police or a friend or at least her parents but instead she went to her room and cried herself to sleep. But it was always easy to say those things afterwards.

The next day it was already too late and the guy turned the whole story around. Now it was her who tried to seduce him. Now she was that desperate bitch who kept hitting on boys.School was like hell. It was like one of those high school dramas about bullying that just seem unreal. She knew that bullying wasn't just a fictional thing but she didn't think she could ever become one of those wronged girls who found their text books covered in insults and glue on her chair.

It was after she had to change her phone number because someone had used it on flyers that advertised her as a 'willing high school domina' that Huang Zitao approached her. At that point she really was desperate.

He wasn't even particularly nice but she clung to the tiny hope that he maybe did want to help her. She didn't see him as a person but as the possible future Wu Yifan, someone who could have given her back her normal life.

It was because no one talked to her and because she avoided everyone else that she didn't realize that she became a tool in a war. In the end it was all about Park Chanyeol again. She was the weapon against Baekhyun who made the mistake to stand up for him.She entered the canteen with Zitao who provocatively had his arm around her hip and she felt like she suddenly was on top of the social ladder.

But it was just a show and she realized it the moment they ran into Baekhyun.

"Oh, hey, Baekhyun," Zitao yelled when he saw him sitting at a table with some other friends. "I'm borrowing your girl for a bit. I heard I have to pay you for her? I would appreciate it if you could give me a discount."She ran away after that and hid in a toilet stall.

She should have hit Zitao or kicked him in the groin. Or she should have demanded him to pay her on the spot. She should have done anything really but it was always easier to think of these things afterwards.

Right now the last option she saw was to leave the school and never come back. It was just her second year. She could still transfer to another school where no one knew her and where this damn curse that one mistake had put on her would end.

It took a while until she felt sane and normal again and decided that she was ready. All that was left was to pick her bag and after that she would just go home.

That at least was the plan. When she left the restroom though, she found the next blow waiting for her in the form of Baekhyun who was leaning against the wall next to the door.

She really didn't think she could deal with him mocking her. He who had reason enough to hate her.

Instead he just gave her a quick glance and held out his hand that was holding a packaged bread and strawberry milk. "I wasn't sure if you maybe drowned in the toilet," he said and lifted the corners of his mouth in what could have been a smile. "But I thought you might be hungry."

And suddenly she felt like crying. Because of the weight on her shoulders and because she was touched and because she hated herself for ruining the last thing in her life that was good and right. Because it all went wrong the moment she thought that Baekhyun, sweet Baekhyun who still remembered that she loved strawberries, wasn't enough.

- knives -Kim Joonmyun was supposed to be in cram school. He was supposed to study for his university entrance exams and to prepare for his future. Instead he cried while peeling onions.

He looked at Yixing who hummed a melody and who made it seem like a really fun thing to do, just as if onions were the most precious and exciting things the earth had ever seen.

He sighed and wiped his tears with his sleeve and tried to be positive about it. He would probably get immune after a while and then he could proudly tell his future wife that he wasn't just some rich brat but a real man who wouldn't even cry if faced with a pile of huge juicy onions. Kim Joonmyun, the Onion Slayer.

"If you think this is bad, just wait for tomorrow," Yixing said cheerfully. "Cause if you don't wash your hands properly they will smell like foul onions for days."

Joonmyun stared at his hands. He really should have taken the gloves Yixing offered him but he didn't want to act like wuss and now he was becoming one anyway. A stinky teary-eyed wuss.

And all that just because he made the mistake to mention that he didn't real feel like studying. He wasn't even serious then, he just said it to seem like he was one of the cool kids who were indifferent about their grades. Zhang Yixing then invited him to come along to visit Wu Yifan in his family's restaurant and Wu Yifan told them that if they wanted to eat, they would have to help him out a little.

Joonmyun was about to mention that he didn't mind paying in cash when Yixing already had his sleeves rolled up and asked him whether he knew how to use a knife. Of course he said yes. He knew how to cut steaks and how to butter sandwiches but when he was handed a knife that looked like the kind people used to stab each other in movies, he realized that there definitely were different ways of defining 'a knife'.At first it was just him and Yixing peeling onions in the back of the restaurant because there weren't any customers but the more time he spent there, the less he felt like he was still in his own home country.

An elderly man walked in and yelled something in Chinese. Yixing shouted for Wu Yifan who returned from the kitchen, discussed something with the man and then got a plastic bag from behind the counter that he handed him. The man waved them all goodbye and Joonmyun felt a little left out because he was the only one who couldn't really take part in anything. For all he knew they could have dealt drugs.

It just went on like that for quite a while. Wu Yifan had them wipe the tables and refill the fridge with drinks and cut meat and vegetables as other customers came and left. Some had something to eat, others just said hello and what most of them had in common was the fact that they obviously assumed that everyone else would understand them if they spoke Chinese. It was very different from the Korean places he knew that specialised in Chinese food because it wasn't fancy or chic. It was foreign and comfy exactly because no one tried to make it special. No one really explained anything to him, probably because they didn't really find anything unusual and Joonmyun found himself liking the place.It went all really well until the situation suddenly deteriorated. A group of five scary-looking guys walked into the restaurant and before they even said anything, one of them kicked down a chair. Two young women who shared a meal just stared at them in shock, one old lady left the place.

Yixing jumped up immediately and Wu Yifan came running while shouting what sounded like insults. Joonmyun already pictured them all lying in puddles of their own blood after being stabbed to death with a kitchen knife but it was over before anything serious could happen, probably because Wu Yifan really was just as scary. Rather than a cook, he probably should have become a mob boss. Or a dictator or a general or anything but a cook really.

It was after Yixing placed the chair back to where it belonged while apologizing to the customers who left in a hurry that he turned to Joonmyun. Wu Yifan meanwhile had returned to the kitchen like a king who knew that his subject would take care of the rest.

"Sorry about that," Yixing said with a sigh. When Joonmyun probably gave him a really bewildered look he explained, "You know, there's this friend of ours who got himself into trouble lately. We tried to help him and now those guys keep turning up."

And Joonmyun felt even more as if he accidentally walked into a complete different world from the one he knew.

- that's not what I imagined my future to be like -Shim In Ja used to work as a legal assistant and she did her job well. At least as far as she remembered. But now that she passed her 50th birthday her experiences didn't really mean anything anymore.

She was 25 when she married a lawyer almost 10 years older than herself and when she gave birth to a son, she thought that she reached all the goals life could offer a woman like her.

25 years, three children and thousands of hours in the kitchen later though, she began to wonder whether this was really it. Her children would leave one by one, her husband became more appalling with every day passing by and all she could wait for was to move in with her son's family, to be hated by her future daughter-in-law and to spoil her future grandchildren. To Shim In Ja who used to work as a legal assistant that suddenly didn't seem like enough, so she tried to find a job, completely ignoring literally everyone around her who told her not to.

The problem only was that there weren't really many jobs for middle-aged women like her who wasted their lives as housewives. When her only other option was to clean toilets, she ended up working in a tiny local supermarket.

Shim In Ja liked to think that gossip was below her, so she didn't really get along well with the other middle-aged ladies who thought of her as arrogant. But the more time she spent doing monotonous work, the more interested she became in all the customers. She barely ever talked to any of them but it was as if she slowly became part of their daily lives. She knew the bargain-hunting housewives and the single workers who seemed to live off beer and instant noodles and the newly-weds who bought pasta and wine.She soon put customers in groups because she noticed that people who seemed similar often followed a similar lifestyle and thus bought similar products. Minki's brother for example used to belong to the single household group.

She really pitied him. She knew Minki really well because he was best friends with her son but around the time their parents broke up, only his brother was left in the neighbourhood. Minki, his sister and his mother moved out and his father didn't seem to come home very often, so it was his brother who came to the supermarket one a week to buy the kind of food that didn't require any cooking skills.

For a while there was another boy who accompanied him every once in a while and his sister also came by every now and then, so she knew that Minki's brother probably wasn't too lonely but there were still times when she wanted to invite him to have dinner with her family."Hyung, what do we even need so much rice for?" the tall boy asked when Minki's brother handed him a sack full of it.

In Ja watched them as inconspicuously as possible while rearranging the noodle packages. It was always entertaining to see the two argue.

She knew that they couldn't be brothers because they didn't look alike and she knew that there was no one tall in Minki's family. At first she thought that Minki's brother maybe tutored the tall boy who was obviously younger than him but they came to the supermarket way too often for that and she wondered whether Minki's brother would really waste so much time on helping someone when he was about to graduate high school himself.

"Minjung brought me another stash of food," Minki's brother explained and walked to the next aisle. "I don't know about you but I'd like some rice with it."

The tall boy put the sack on the floor and sighed. "Seriously, don't you feel sorry for yourself sometimes, hyung?" he said emphatically. "Do you want to rely on Minjung to get you food for the rest of your life?"

Minki's brother shrugged and put a container with pepper paste in his plastic basket. "I'm not relying on her and she just wants to help."

"Yeah, right," the tall boy scoffed. "And you surely don't act pitiful when you tell her that we have no food at home and that her cooking tastes like the most delicious shit any poor mortal being ever had the change to try."

Minki's brother pulled a face at him, mumbled, "I never said it like that." and walked off to the dairy section. He got two cartons of milk when the tall boy caught up after making a fuss about having to pick up the sack of rice again.

"What I'm trying to say is," the tall boy said and put some yoghurt in the basket. "If you keep encouraging her, she won't stop and then she will hang around even more and I really do like her but sometimes I think she just doesn't understand the meaning of personal space."

Minki's brother snorted and the tall boy gave him a weird look. "What?"

"Nothing," Minki's brother laughed. "It's just funny that you of all people would complain about that."

"Come on, hyung, I'm serious here," the tall boy wailed and shouldered the rice. "If you wouldn't have forced me to stop working in the convenience store, we'd have more ramyun and kimbab than we could eat and I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't have been any worse than Minjung's cooking."

"So you think it's better to live off the free expired food they were going to throw out?" Minki's bother asked with an almost disgusted face. The tall boy was about explain that the food was still perfectly fine when he continued, "And anyway, I wouldn't mind you working there if your grades weren't dropping even more."

The tall boy clicked his tongue as they went to pay. "Well, thank you very much for trying to substitute for my mother but I'm perfectly capable of making my own decisions. What do I need high grades for if I don't want to go to university anyway?"

Minki's brother looked like he was tired of the argument and handed the cashier the money with a forced smile, when the tall boy continued, "I mean, it's my future, not yours."

"Oh, okay, sorry for bothering then," Minki's brother said coldly. He took both the sack with rice and the plastic bag with the rest and literally shoved the tall boy away when he tried to help. "Just don't be surprised if I refuse to give you any spare change when I see you begging in the streets in the future."

Minki's brother marched out, the tall boy hurried after him and both In Ja and her cashier colleague were at the window. Outside they saw the tall boy who was hunching down to try and take the sack and Minki's brother who looked like he straightened his back on purpose to seem at least a little taller.

"I hope they'll be okay," the cashier said. She was one of those middle-aged women who worked in a supermarket exactly because she liked the gossip. "They're such a cute couple."

And In Ja still couldn't stand her but nodded in agreement. She'd never seen Minki's brother as lively as in the company of that noisy tall boy.

- respect -Huang Zitao was lost.

When Yifan left the school and suddenly became tame and boring, Zitao came to wonder whether that was really the guy he used to idolize. It was even more frustrating when he realized that people didn't even respect him as much as Yifan now that he wasn't his protégé any longer.

It was because he was Chinese and younger than his classmates because he skipped a grade that they didn't take him serious. He didn't mean to confront anyone because he knew that fighting wouldn't really get him anywhere but he still didn't really see why he should have been nice to all the idiots who treated him like shit. Park Chanyeol for example was just asking for it. He and his stupid friend who decided to bully him.

It wasn't even like he made anything up. Sure, Park Chanyeol's private life had nothing to do with him and he didn't even really care but if that idiot didn't try harder to cover everything up, he didn't have any reason to feel wronged. Zitao simply talked about things everyone already knew and added that Yixing saw Kim Minseok with Lu Han when Byun Baekhyun suddenly beat him up.

His left eye was so swollen he could barely see anything but he was told that it was 'nothing serious'. Baekhyun had to sweep the yard and clean the toilets for a week but after that he went back to being a normal well-liked student. Because Baekhyun was the good guy who punished the bad guy. Because the whole school was a bunch of racists who closed their eyes when a Korean kid hurt a Chinese kid, one of those people who weren't supposed to be there to begin with. He was a foreign delinquent, so everyone assumed that it was completely okay for him to be in pain.

He probably went overboard after that but all he could think of was that he wanted to at least hurt Baekhyun's pride because he knew he wouldn't get away if he broke his bones. So he approached Kang Hanna.It was a stupid idea and when she suddenly ran away and didn't come back to class, he knew he made a mistake. It did satisfy him to see Baekhyun's face turning red but he wondered whether Hanna really deserved to be stepped on even more. Sure, he didn't think that she had anyone to blame but herself but he was nothing but a coward to use someone who had no one to defend her.

The people around him did respect him a little more after that but not in a good way. Now he really was the villain who was so ruthless no one wanted to mess with him.

And he wondered if that maybe was what Yifan felt like. Yifan did to bad things before but maybe he only became tame because he didn't want to be feared after all.

All Zitao wanted was respect but now that he wasn't so sure about that any longer, his future seemed blank.

- friday night -"You can't be serious. Where did you even get those from?"

Kim Jongin wondered about that, too. He assumed that Sehun stole the three bottles of soju from his father's personal stock but rather than to explain it, Sehun tried to get past Park Chanyeol. "Who cares, hyung? Just take it as a free gift from your friendly visitors."

Jongin just shook his head. He shoud have said that he didn't care when Sehun told him that he could get them inside Park Chanyeol's apartment but his curiosity forced him to do otherwise. It wasn't like he still expected to find anything particularly interesting. He had been hanging out with both Sehun and Chanyeol a couple of times by now and he was pretty sure that Chanyeol was a lot more average than Sehun liked to make him believe back when he still stalked him.

It was mostly because he wanted to laugh at Sehun for failing to get inside once more. And maybe because Chanyeol was still so secretive about his housing conditions.

"You're just asking for trouble, really," Chanyeol scoffed and was about to close the door when Sehun leaned against it to force it open. "I'm not going to let your mother beat me up because you got drunk in my room."

"I already told her that we're going to stay to play games," Sehun explained and rolled one of the bottles inside. "Oh, pardon me, I'm afraid I need to get inside to get that back."

Jongin was, frankly, embarrassed to even know Sehun sometimes.

Chanyeol was close to slamming the door shut when his phone suddenly rang. It was as if he instantly forgot about them because he even instinctly jumped out of the way when Sehun forced himself inside. It was really awkward for a few seconds when Sehun stood inside with the door wide open and when Chanyeol just glared at his phone with a frown.

He angrily put it back into his pocket and seemed surprised when Sehun and Jongin were still around. "Well, anyway," he said with a shrug. "Be my guest."Chanyeol's sudden change of mind wasn't the result of Sehun's genius persuasion skills but apparently because of Kim Minseok. He didn't mention that of course when he downed half a bottle of soju by himself but it became quite obvious when his phone rang again and when he yelled things like 'tell your father I totally don't mind him coming home on short notice' and 'no need, hyung, because I'm having the time of my life here'.Two hours later Sehun was fast asleep on Chanyeol's makeshift bed and Chanyeol finally dozed off after telling Jongin that the reason why he didn't have any proper furniture was that his father lost all his money to a gambling place and that his mother and sister were sold off to a brothel in Thailand.

At first Jongin really didn't want Kim Minseok to come by, simply because Kim Minseok now was in university. It was weird enough to sit on the floor of a high school student's apartment but Jongin could have been in high school, too, had his parents not decided to enroll him in school a year later with all the younger kids born in '94 because he used to be really short. He figured that the difference between middle and high school wasn't all that big anyway, they all wore uniforms after all. But university students were on a completely different level from that. They could do whatever they wanted which could have included calling his parents to tell them that their son got drunk in a shabby place with two idiots.When Kim Minseok was there though, it didn't really change much about the situation. Right after he arrived he just scolded Chanyeol for allowing boys in middle school to drink any alcohol but when Chanyeol obviously barely listened and just leaned against the wall to not fall over while nodding as if he agreed to everything, Kim Minseok just sighed. He looked at Sehun who still slept like a baby and at Jongin who awkwardly stood in a corner and back at Chanyeol whose eyes were almost shut, as if he was about to nod off again.

"Are you hungry?" Kim Minseok asked Jongin and flicked Chanyeol's forehead. Chanyeol  then startled up and held his head like a man wounded in war, before his knees gave way and he fell on the floor.

"Uh, a little, I guess," Jongin slowly said as he watched Chanyeol who now slapped his own face to sober up.

"Please don't cook, hyung!" Chanyeol wailed as he stood up and followed Kim Minseok who walked to the built-in kitchen. "Take pity on us!"

Kim Minseok rummaged through some drawers before he asked, "Don't you have any delivery service flyers?"

"I don't know. Maybe," Chanyeol said sluggishly and held onto the back of Kim Minseok's shirt. "You see, hyung, I'm really poor because my father was an international spy but now he's in a prison in Cambodia."

Kim Minseok opened another drawer and finally found what he was looking for. He scanned a couple of leaflets as Chanyeol started to snuggle up to him. "How about chicken?" he finally asked and looked up. Sehun's condition still hadn't changed and Jongin must have appeared very uncomfortable when Chanyeol pulled up the front of Kim Minseok's shirt while mumbling something about it being 'damn ugly' and about someone called Minjung who apparently had no taste, because Kim Minseok immediately freed himself and got his phone.

"I like chicken," Jongin said when Chanyeol didn't answer and instead walked off to kick Sehun to get him off his mattress and Kim Minseok seemed thankful that at least one person still was somewhat sober.In the end Jongin wished he had been more drunk though.